A Breath of Scandal: The Reckless Brides (32 page)

He put his hand to the back of her neck and pushed her head down between her knees. “Try to aim away from my boots. And yours. And breathe. Long inhalations through your nose. That’s it.” He rubbed his thumbs into her knotted shoulders. “Just breathe.”

After a few deep inhalations, she said, “You’ve done this before.”

“I have.” He kept on rubbing her shoulders, smoothing his palms up the long length of her spine.

“You can let me up now.” She put her hands on her knees and lifted her head.

“In a moment. These boots are borrowed. Just breathe.”

He could hear her smile as she blew out a long, shaky breath. “I’m all right now. Really.”

“Slowly. Don’t stand up too fast. I don’t want you to faint.”

“I never faint,” she protested, but all the indignant heat had run out of her.

He propped her back up against the wall. “Never say never. I’ve fainted.”

She was still blowing air out of her lungs as if she had run a race. “Have you really?”

“Yes.” He decided to distract her. “Fainted dead away at the first full broadside at Trafalgar. Knocked me down, the concussion did. I was standing at the taffrail—that’s at the stern of the ship for you country women—with the signal flags. I was the signal midshipman. Had to be hauled upright by the sailing master.” She was still a little green around the gills, but she was smiling, which was what he intended. “I will have you know, I was only twelve at the time.”

“Thank God Aldridge didn’t know you.”

There wasn’t much he could say to that. “I am sorry. But it were better that you know.”

“Yes,” she agreed, but she was still too shaken to believe the truth of it. Her gut was probably still knotted up like a noose.

“At least you’ll know what you have to do now.”

She did the last thing he expected, and laughed—a hopeless little huff of gallows humor that rolled her shoulders forward.

“Preston? You do know what you have to do? You have to break it off.”

“Yes.” She was nodding in agreement, but her eyes were shut tight, and he heard the numb, hopeless exhaustion in her voice. “I see that.” She was still nodding. But still numb and shaken. Shaken by the knowledge. Shaken by the fear of what she might have done, might have become. Or perhaps she was still shaking at the thought of what she now had to do. She scrunched her face up tight. “God, it’s all so tangled.”

He took her hands in his, mostly because he still wanted to hold her, however he could. “Courage,” he said, and kissed first one hand, and then the other.

“Thank you. You really are a good friend. No one else would have told me that. No one else
has
told me that, though clearly other people knew.”

He tried to lighten the moment with his usual humor. “You can thank me later.”

Her eyes opened then, and she looked at him in that direct, open way of hers. “I’d rather thank you now.” There wasn’t much exhaustion in her voice now. It had been replaced by determination. And something else. Something direct and demanding and aware.

“Preston, I’m deeply, deeply flattered, but you’ve had a shock. I think it’s best that I take you home now.”

“I don’t want to go home.” She pushed away from the wall and reached for the lapel of his coat. “Do you remember when we first met, that night, and I said I was done with slowly and obediently?”

“Yes,” he answered, not sure where she was intent on driving this particular thought. “You said you were going to start off going recklessly and heedlessly.” Which had resulted in a tavern brawl of the first order. “Pray forgive my lamentable lack of enthusiasm, Pres, but I think we’ve both had enough rude shocks for one night without adding any of the physical kind.”

“No. I want to add pleasurably to that list. And irrevocably.”

That was the word—irrevocable. He tried to make his words gentle, to soften their bite. “Preston. I am going to take that captaincy from the East India Company. I have to leave. I don’t think—”

“Then don’t think. Feel.” Her hand had insinuated itself back under his loose shirttail, and was easing its way along his waistband.

He could feel the banked embers of his arousal easily stirring to flame. “Preston. I’m flattered, but don’t do anything you’ll regret.”

“I won’t regret it. I’ll regret it if I don’t.” She began to kiss the patch of skin just below the hollow of his throat.

He closed his eyes against the temptation she so easily made him feel. He swallowed his own regret. “You don’t want this. You only think you do, because you’re hurt and afraid.”

“I’m not afraid. Will, this is what I want to do,” she said, spreading her hands wide against his chest. Her voice was shaking with conviction. “I want to be with
you
while I can. You and no one else. Please,” she pleaded, entreating him with her eyes, dark and wide in the night. “Don’t let it be anyone else. Don’t let it be him.”

Will grabbed her coat and yanked her hard against him, his pent-up anger and frustration and passion and, yes, jealousy overheating and overruling his better nature. He had never, never wanted something he could not have so bloody badly. “I was about to fuck you in the nearest pile of hay, and you would have let me!” he said with crude cruelty, his face mere inches from hers.

“Of course I would have let you!” She slammed her palms hard against his chest for emphasis, knocking him back. “Of course! Isn’t that what you want? It’s what
I
want!” She looked at him defiantly, not retreating for a moment in the face of her passion. “What else were we about with the nights, and the outings, and the kissing? I thought this is what you wanted, too.” Her breath rose white in the air around her head, wreathing her in a cloud of recrimination.

“Perhaps, I did,” he admitted. “Yes, of course. My God, yes,” he amended. “But I’ve learned to think better of it. We can’t just go off like a loaded cannon. We have to think! But not here. Not like this. Not like two animals in heat in the middle of a blasted rainstorm!”

She was stymied, all angry, confused frustration. “Well, if you aren’t the most perverse, contrary man in all London. In all of bloody Christendom.”

He stared at her, feeling dark and bleak, and as hard and frustrated as he had ever felt in his life. And she stared back, meeting his strength with her own, not giving an inch. Demanding answers he didn’t have and couldn’t give. Accusations and recriminations swirled unspoken between them. “You’re still engaged to be married, Preston. Or had you forgot that?”

“No. I have not forgot. How could I? It has been forced upon me like a vile-tasting medicine, shoved down my throat until I swallowed.”

“I’ll say it again. You have choices.”

“And you are my only choice.” Her voice broke, cracked open into a hundred pieces.

It ate at him, her purposeful disregard for herself. “Do you have so little regard for yourself that you would throw yourself away in a back alley?”

She gaped at him, hurt and denial surging across her face. “No, Will.” She shook her head again. “Why don’t you understand?”

“I understand a lot more than you think,” he stated decisively.

His cool obstinacy touched her off like dry gunpowder. “Not enough. Not enough to see that duty isn’t just something you go off to sea or to the Indies to do. Sometimes duty means staying to protect your family.”

“I’m trying to protect
you,
you perverse girl.”

“Then go. Go before I’m tempted to hit you. I’ll only end up hurting myself.”

“Preston.” He tried to explain. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t do this. A few stolen kisses are one thing, but I will not ruin you. I will not ruin you and then just go.” His arm swept out, encompassing the future and the likelihoods that awaited them there. “I can’t do that to you.”

And he turned and walked away, back the way he had come, down the dark, bleak, rain-slick alley.

Because clearly, he
was
the most perverse man in London.

Chapter Nineteen

He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand that she loved him. She loved him enough to face censure or scandal to be with him. She loved him enough to give him the only thing she had left to give—herself.

He said he wouldn’t ruin her and go, but he was gone all the same.

And she was left standing in Clarges Mews, in the rain, in the middle of the night, to unravel the twisted skein of lies that entangled her and bound her still to Aldridge.

She needed to think. She needed to do as her papa would have advised her to do and make equations—balance the benefit against the potential loss, the good against the evil. But the evil was so weighty, so far beyond her experience, that the scales were tipped hopelessly askew.

She had to end the engagement—there was no question. But when? They were beholden to Lady Barrington—guests in her home. The moment Antigone ended her association with Aldridge, Lady Barrington would demand their removal. They had nowhere else to go but home to a house they could barely afford. And what would happen to Viscount Jeffrey’s mooted proposal if Cassie had to bear the disgrace of being sent away from London on the post?

Lord help her, but a drink of brandy would not go amiss right now. Antigone felt depleted, as worn down as an old nag being pushed and pulled, first one way and then another. She couldn’t seem to please anybody, let alone herself. And she ached. There wasn’t a corner of her body that wasn’t wounded by the pain radiating from her irrevocably broken heart. But at least things could not get any worse.

“Antigone?”

She closed her eyes and swore under her breath for making herself such a pleasing target for vengeful fate. And then she turned to Lord Aldridge.

He stood, framed by the arched doorway of the stable block, still wearing his evening clothes of satin breeches, silk hose, and slippers, looking like he had been disturbed from his own glass of brandy. Pity the crabby old devil didn’t think to share.

“What, may I ask, are you doing here?” His dry, nasal drawl held nothing of her whistling-in-the-dark amusement.

A question at last. But it was too late to reconcile her—she only wanted to get away from him as fast as possible now. “I came to see my mare. I come almost every night.”

Let him make of that what he would. Let him disapprove. Let him be as displeased as he liked.

But instead of disdain, or dawning horror at her very obvious unsuitability to be a Lady Aldridge, what she saw on his face was that same smile she had seen the first day—the day of Papa’s funeral—that strange, satisfied turning up of his lip, as if her intransigence secretly pleased rather than annoyed him.

Oh, holy bloody hell. Of course he liked it. It was
childish
and
boyish
of her to sneak out at night. He would like that she acted and dressed like a stable boy. He would like that she was unruly and ungovernable. It would probably give him great pleasure to exert his efforts to tame her, if not in bed then in other, more frightening ways.

God Almighty. She had inadvertently been confirming his choice of her as the only kind of woman he could stomach.

The thought made her own stomach knot up like an iron fist.

“Who were you talking to?” His gaze combed the alley from one end to the other.

“A horseman.” Antigone gestured vaguely toward Curzon Street. Let him think she talked to strange men. Let him think she was as promiscuous as a harlot. Let Aldridge think as ill of her as he would—it could be nothing to what she thought of him.

“What are you doing out at this time of night? Have you no sense?”

“Very little, apparently. But I like to see to my mare’s welfare.” She had not forgotten his offensive assertion of ownership in Northfield’s stable. “She is still
my
horse, sir.”

“Not for long,” he snapped.

Oh, yes. He had plans for Velocity, didn’t he? “Perhaps never.” She kept her own voice as smooth and undisturbed as his was perturbed. “You should know that the mare isn’t suitable for breeding, if that’s why you’ve insisted on bringing and keeping her here.”

That brought him up short and tight. “What do you mean?”

“She had severe bouts of colic as a filly, before she came to me. Almost died. Grosvenor was advised never to breed her. Why else do you think someone as canny about horses as Lord Grosvenor would give such a valuable filly to me?” She had almost said “to a twelve-year-old,” but she did not want him to think of her in that way any more than she could help.

The sudden forced abandonment of his elaborately constructed plans left him livid. Though he said not a word, his face was pinched with such ferocious displeasure, his lips drew down into two thin white lines.

Good. She wanted to goad him into a display of temper. She wanted him to be so disgusted he would end it now. In her moment of satisfaction she allowed herself the sarcasm of saying, “Perhaps I’m not such an attractive prospect now?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he hissed. “I’ve invested too much time and too much money in you to withdraw now, mare or no mare. If I breed her and she dies it’s no great loss to me. But you on the other hand … I have grown weary of this childish game.”

There was that word again, crawling under her skin like a parasite. “I am not a child, sir.” She drew herself up to her full height. “I am a woman grown.”

“Good. Because I am done with waiting for you to accustom yourself to our marriage. Child or not, it is time you learned to do as you are told.”

“I will do as I
please.
You do not own Velocity, and you certainly do not own me, sir.”

“You think not?” There it was again, the pleased, chilly disdain. “You’re beholden to me for the very clothes on your back. Though not these particular clothes.” But his scornful glance at her old redingote gave him pause, and brought on a more narrow-eyed scrutiny of the worn garment.

Oh, bloody hell. She couldn’t have him associating her with the stable boy he had seen, and so obviously—oh, God, it was all becoming so wretchedly, wretchedly clear—so obviously been attracted to at Northfield.

“You haven’t bought my clothes.” The clothes she had been wearing in London were all Cassie’s castoffs. Before she had met Will Jellicoe, she had never cared about her clothes. And now that he was gone from her life, she could find no reason to put herself to the unnecessary trouble of primping and polishing.